Siddharth 📝🎮

Crypto is becoming increasingly connected with existing businesses and it’s a good thing. Every few weeks we see an example where crypto expands possibilities for existing businesses. 1. Either in the form of boosting the bottom line by saving costs or bringing additional revenue 2. Or by expanding TAM by letting companies reach new customers AZ-COM Maruwa Holdings, a Japanese logistics company, buying a stake into JPY stablecoin issuer was an example of how crypto is merging with traditional businesses. If you think about it, a stablecoin acts as a loan the user makes to the issuer for free. You give Circle a dollar, you get a token that doesn't pay you anything. Circle keeps the interest your dollar earns while sitting in Treasury bills. You forgo the interest for convenience. Everybody is happy. Circle can keep all the interest as long as it is dealing with many small holders (B2C). The equation changes when Circle has to go B2B2C. Stablecoin issuers are like asset managers. Their income is directly proportional to stablecoin’s float. But the float needs a reason to grow, a reason for the end user to hold your stablecoin. This is where distributors enter the picture. Circle pays Coinbase and Hyperliquid a significant chunk of the interest earned because, without Coinbase making USDC the default and Hyperliquid making USDC the collateral, the float itself would collapse. For years, a yen stablecoin was pointless because Japanese bonds paid zero or less, so the free loan earned nothing. Then the BoJ raised rates to 1%, the highest since 1995, regulators let issuers hold government bonds in reserves, and the spread finally exists in yen. JPYC is the first registered issuer, and an investor in its new $38M round is the trucking company AZ-COM Maruwa. Maruwa is JPYC's Coinbase. Both convert a captive capital from their audience into a stablecoin float. Coinbase's audience is people with exchange accounts. Maruwa's is its workforce. It runs payroll for about 2,300 drivers and contractors and pays them in JPYC. Payroll might be the strongest distribution channel money has, since salary is how money enters a person's hands in the first place. Every payday, yen flows into JPYC's reserves. The drivers become holders by default, just as Coinbase users ended up with USDC. The issuer earns bond yield on every unspent day. Since payroll recurs monthly, the float is replenished. Coinbase and Maruwa are different means to the same end. Coinbase charges Circle rent, and the rent now eats most of Circle's income. Maruwa bought equity in the issuer instead, so every yen of float it routes in raises the value of its own stake. Japan just put the distributor on the cap table from day one. Users lend issuers money for free; rates determine what it is worth; and distribution decides who keeps the interest. So I'd skip the volume charts for now and watch who is responsible for the float.

Investors are not betting on tokens as much anymore, and we have been thinking why. There are three kinds of assets that have accrued value in the past 18 months. 1. Assets that commit revenue to buybacks. Hyperliquid is an instance of this. 2. Assets that commit to governance through tokens requiring institutional partners to purchase the token to own a stake in the network. Morpho is an instance of this. 3. Ones that do not issue tokens but issue equity directly to private investors. Deribit, Privy, Rain fall in this camp. The market has wised up and is no longer willing to pay ridiculous multiples for low-revenue tokens without a great future. Pre AI crypto was the hot asset class. In 2026, AI takes that crown. So where does value go? Tokenisation is the trend that has been winning. Stablecoins were the first attempt at it. On-chain stocks are the second iteration. Blockchains will become the infrastructure layer where the world’s assets will be traded and settled. These assets will not be issued by foundations and labs with funny piecharts for token distributions, but more often than not by large institutions. The assets represented would be on-chain equivalents of traditional assets alongside native ones. 1. Ondo has 438 assets represented on chain. 2. Blackrock’s BUIDL has $2.3B represented on-chain. 3. Similarly, Centrifuge has scaled to $1.62B in TVL by focusing on treasury funds ($870M ) and a AAA corporate fund ($686M). None of these are what would be considered “tokens” in the conventional realm of digital assets. But in 2026, they are all digital asset representations of where the industry is headed. If you are into issuing tokens, pivot to capturing value from tokenisation. The reason for this secular trend is fairly simple. In 2022, there was the hope that radical decentralisation and DAO-native models that are run by token holders will upend traditional firms. And tokens represented a meaningful premium. In 2025, that premium turned into a discount as most asset Users see the value in tokenised representations of real world assets due to improvements in accessibility and cost. They do not value the 50th dex on the 18th L2 Tokenisation is the easiest mechanism to export the best assets from mature markets like the US and Korea to the world. It gives a mechanism for financial primitives to communicate with the marvel that globalisation itself was. The rails on which these assets move, settle and are stored will be valuable. We think, for investors and founders, this really just means four things 1. Crypto has reached a level of maturity where moats and network effects matter. The players that have emerged and dominated in the last 24 months were capital-intensive, walled IP ecosystems that spoke to finance at scale. Both Ethena and Hyperliquid had moats of capital and networks that can’t be rivaled. 2. Value accrual will increasingly be in the equity side of the equation. If you are trying to raise, seeing where tokenisation unlocks new markets or business models may be far easier an answer to find than to compete with being the 50th iteration of a Hyperliquid trading interface 3. Geo-specific markets are not as mature as the ones in the US. Tokenisation unlocks fintech primitives that were not possible earlier in emerging markets. Cracking distribution, UX and business models can lead to economies of scale in these new markets 4. Lastly - question what can be tokenised and why?. USDAI tokenised the debt markets around GPUs. There are players tokenising energy markets. A good place to start is to revisit the graveyard of dead startups in 2017 and explore what could come on-chain today due to changes in regulation and infrastructure not just beacuse it can but because there is demand. Blockchains are capital rails, but the new winners among startups will be ones that redefine what forms of capital can be pushed in these rails Where tokens allow anyone to be an asset issuer, tokenisation focuses on bringing productive assets to the masses. It creates a pathway to retain the benefits of DeFi - be it composability, 24/7 markets or global access, without the risks of buying into a random token. As consumers look towards better alternatives to hedge their own savings and diversify asset classes, tokenisation will become the common trend. For founders and investors, the fork in the road ahead asks a simple question: do you bet on a private, equity-native vehicle or do you bootstrap a network from scratch with a token? Right now, we are leaning away from tokens and towards equity.